Kom, Ambroise (2005) “Redesigning the African university, emerging from subalternity” in CODESRIA Bulletin no. 1 & 2. page 4-7.
p. 5: “To put it plainly, colonial authority has created the university in Africa by taking careful account not only of the representation it makes of itself through the education dispensed, but also by fixing from the very beginning the image that Africans should have of themselves and of their university studies. And that image is solidly inscribed in subordination.”
p. 6: “The colonial university, just like the white master’s school, was part of the arsenal that allowed him to inscribe us in his ‘narration’, to use the term dear to Edward Said, who wrote: ‘nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”
p. 7: “The university that might have contributed to the establishment of tools of nation-building should have stated . . . the de-mythification of Euramerica and should have decoded the way in which it has been put together. . . But it should also have affirmed its determination to extract us from subalternity, from the negativeness of the Other’s look by presenting, like the Chinese and numerous other Asians, a representation of ourselves as those who steal fire. Let us understand that the hegemony of Euramerica, legitimate after all, was not a spontaneous affair and that our deprivation/poverty is not a matter of destiny, that it is impossible for us to get out of the mess if we do not perfect an aggressive strategy for reconquering our being-in-the-world.”
p. 7: “If we have not questioned the dominant discourse, have not defined the terms of our own narrative, have not conceived institutions with precise goals that correspond to our immediate and future needs, all our educational programs like all appointments and promotions of teachers will be exercises bordering on futility.”
As Americans and Europeans like to say, it is the institution not the individual that counts – the Presidency not the President; the Monarchy not the Monarch, etc. Africa MUST develop its own institutions.
